You're not going to get any counterarguments from me regarding the fact that
businesses and large enterprises won't like Vista over XP. Vista obviously
requires better hardware than XP, and it may certainly perform slower than
XP in some, or many, workload scenarios that are important to businesses.
Meaning they will have to spend more money to get the same results, and that
makes no sense.

However, that's not what our two original articles were about, and it's most
certainly not what our current point of debate - Vista's performance
improved over time - is all about. So while you may have a good point on
Vista requiring more hardware, or performing worse on the same hardware than
Windows XP does - it's irrelevant to this discussion. We're comparig
Vista-now to Vista-RTM - not to XP.

But, I see we're getting back at the thread count point. I'm afraid we're
going to lose our readers this way. I continue to stick by my original
point, namely that the number of threads says nothing about the amount of
changes made to the kernel. Like I detailed before, any change in thread
count could lead to any possible outcome - increased or lowered performance,
or simply, no gain or loss at all. The fact that your thread count metric
did not pick up any of the significant changes detailed by Mark Russinovich
and Eric Traut clearly shows how useless a metric the thread count statistic
is. That's going to be my final word on thread count, as we have both did
our thing. Let's leave it up to our readers to decide which argumentation
makes more sense to them.

Let's move on the next point on the list, and this time, I'll pick one.

How is it possible that someone who claims to know so much about the NT
kernel appears to be so blatantly ignorant about the concept of MinWin, even
though both Traut and Russinovich detailed the concept so crystal clear? Let
me quote my own artice:

"Kennedy is so wrong about MinWin I'm again at a loss as to where to start.
Despite a number of fairly clear explanations from Microsoft (most notably,
by Mark Russinovich), Kennedy shows a clear lack of understanding on what
MinWin actually is. Microsoft never promised a "clean break", it never
promised a "new kernel". Microsoft has been very clear: MinWin is *not* a
new kernel. It is *not* a streamlined NT kernel. In fact, it *is* the NT
kernel. The only thing Microsoft did was reorganise parts of it to make it
cleaner, and to make sure they had a small core without any outward calls,
so that they could make changes to the Windows kernel without causing
massive breakage."

I'm very interested to hear about where you got the clean break and new
kernel stuff from. Really, I am.